iCOMIC: a graphical interface-driven bioinformatics pipeline for analyzing cancer omics data

Abstract

Despite the tremendous increase in omics data generated by modern sequencing technologies, their analysis can be tricky and often requires substantial expertise in bioinformatics. To address this concern, we have developed a user-friendly pipeline to analyze (cancer) genomic data that takes in raw sequencing data (FASTQ format) as input and outputs insightful statistics on the nature of the data. Our iCOMIC toolkit pipeline can analyze whole-genome and transcriptome data and is embedded in the popular Snakemake workflow management system. iCOMIC is characterized by a user-friendly GUI that offers several advantages, including executing analyses with minimal steps, eliminating the need for complex command-line arguments. The toolkit features many independent core workflows for both whole genomic and transcriptomic data analysis. Even though all the necessary, well-established tools are integrated into the pipeline to enable out-of-the-box analysis, we provide the user with the means to replace modules or alter the pipeline as needed. Notably, we have integrated algorithms developed in-house for predicting driver and passenger mutations based on mutational context and tumor suppressor genes and oncogenes from somatic mutation data. We benchmarked our tool against Genome In A Bottle (GIAB) benchmark dataset (NA12878) and got the highest F1 score of 0.971 and 0.988 for indels and SNPs, respectively, using the BWA MEM - GATK HC DNA-Seq pipeline. Similarly, we achieved a correlation coefficient of r=0.85 using the HISAT2-StringTie-ballgown and STAR-StringTie-ballgown RNA-Seq pipelines on the human monocyte dataset (SRP082682). Overall, our tool enables easy analyses of omics datasets, with minimal steps, significantly ameliorating complex data analysis pipelines. Availability: https://github.com/RamanLab/iCOMIC